We are delighted to share the outstanding achievement of our Year 6 team, who placed 5th overall at the State-level da Vinci Decathlon, a highly competitive academic event involving over 80 schools, including many of the top-performing independent and selective schools across New South Wales.

In addition to this impressive overall ranking, the team also placed:

• 3rd in Art and Poetry
• 3rd in Codebreaking

This remarkable result is one of the highest our School has ever achieved in the Decathlon and reflects the students’ creativity, critical thinking and collaborative spirit.

A heartfelt thank you and congratulations to Mrs Dorothy Segar and Mrs Nicki Stanis for their exceptional mentoring and leadership. Their guidance, encouragement and expertise were instrumental in preparing the team for success.

This is a significant milestone for our School; congratulations to all involved

Rehearsals for our upcoming Hybrid Junior School Musical are coming along beautifully! The students have been working with great enthusiasm and focus, and we are so proud of the progress they’ve made. We can’t wait for you to see their hard work and talent come to life on stage.

Don’t forget to purchase your tickets here; it promises to be an amazing production.

The Walkathon is fast approaching and will take place on Wednesday 25 June (Week 9). This much anticipated event is a fantastic opportunity for students to get active while supporting a meaningful school initiative.

Students will receive their sponsorship card along with further event details soon.

This year, funds raised will go towards exciting new initiatives, such as the development of our new STEM Lab.

We are incredibly grateful to our community for their ongoing support and extend a special thank you to our Year 6 P&F team, who are leading this initiative with great enthusiasm. We look forward to a fun day!

Due to poor weather, the Junior School Athletics Carnival was postponed and will now take place in Term II, Week 2 – Monday 28 July.

There has been an increase in the number of unnamed clothing items and personal belongings in lost property. We are encouraging all students to take greater care and responsibility for their possessions. Please ensure all items are clearly labelled with your child’s name to support this important habit and to assist with the return of lost items. Thank you for your support.

The International Competitions and Assessments for Schools (ICAS) will be on offer during Term III. All the tests are administered at School in an online format and assess complex problem-solving and higher-order thinking skills. As such, they are designed for students who consistently perform at an advanced level in the subject area tested. ICAS test results do not form part of our internal assessment and grading platform but serve as an optional experience for high-performing students who are interested in competing against other students on an internationally recognised scale. Subjects include:

If your child performs at an advanced level in one or more of the areas above, and would like to compete in ICAS, please follow the instructions below:

1. Click on the following link or copy and paste the address into your browser: https://shop.icasassessments.com/pages/pps
2. Enter the TIGS unique access code: WVQ682
3. Complete the form to add student details and then select the ICAS tests you would like to order.

Registrations close Monday 28 July 2025.

More information regarding the ICAS testing can be found on the ICAS website.

Please be reminded of the following Celebration of Learning dates:

• Year 1: 12.00pm, Wednesday 11 June
• Year 3: 12.00pm, Friday 13 June
• Year 5: 12.00pm, Thursday 26 June

The last thing you hear is the foreboding count of, “three, two one!”, which floods your ears as you furiously start answering a set of questions more difficult than you hoped or expected. The time goes fast, too fast, and soon it’s gone. Your head is a whirl as you move through tasks, but you’re enjoying the experience too much to stop.

All too soon, the papers are finished, marked and ready to go. Bring on the anticipation and hoping. In Regionals for us Year 7 Students, the excitement and bewilderment we felt in that winning moment of glory were beyond our comprehension – we were through to State.

The Senior School da Vinci Decathlon is a challenging academic competition where teams of eight students from Years 7 to 10 from different schools complete papers in 10 categories, including Maths, Science, Code-breaking, Ideation, English, Art and Poetry.

It is not for the faint-hearted. However, da Vinci is something very close to my heart, and more than worth the effort it takes.

Our success at Regionals was a truly gratifying experience. After coming a somewhat disappointing fourth in the Decathlon last year, many of us did not know what to expect. But in the moment when the hosts announced that Illawarra Grammar were the winners, we had proved to ourselves that we could do it and do it again!

It now meant that as a team, we needed to work as hard as we could to prepare for State. We organised regular practices in the Library and hunted down practice papers to get used to answering harder questions. When the big day finally arrived, we walked into the Knox Grammar School gates ready to take on whatever came our way. 

Although we felt we had worked hard as a team and performed well, we were disappointed to learn we had not finished in the top 3 for any of the events.

However, after furiously checking the da Vinci website in the days that followed, the state results finally came out. We realised we had actually come 13th out of 60 regional winning schools! While not at the top of the pile, it showed me that the hard work we had put in had really paid off.

If you’re thinking of applying for da Vinci, be prepared to work hard, but also experience some of the most stressful fun at the same time. There’s nothing quite like it. 

I’ll definitely be back next year, more determined than ever – State champions, 2026, here we come.

In an age of rapidly increasing popularity and efficiency of AI, we must ask ourselves an honest, confronting and important question. Is a half-decent mark on that essay that you didn’t really earn worth the hidden expenses? 

As of 2024, we are projected to waste an estimated 6.6 billion cubic metres of water annually by 2027 (Pinheiro Privette 2024). That amounts to enough to supply a country like Denmark six times as much water as it needs. So, ask yourself– is that mark really worth the waste of the 0.5% of clean water the Earth provides for us? Coterminous to the environmental dangers of Artificial Intelligence, something much more uniquely human is at stake. 

Your ideas, your critical thinking, your ability to express, develop, and organise your unique and complex thoughts. Your ability to communicate with clarity, purpose, and passion. Is an easy pass worth the loss of your self-expression and augmentation of your written communication skills? Sure, AI can string together grammatically correct sentences and cut down your writing to fit the word limit, but it won’t ever be able to replicate the unique, rich, human ability to express complex and passionate thought with the way in which humans do. 

Every time you let AI write for you, you are throwing away an opportunity to sharpen your own ability to write, refine your thinking, and grow in confidence as a writer and as a person. Your voice becomes generic, boring, uniform – AI can imitate tone, but it will never be able to replicate your own unique style, lived experiences and personal voice. It will never be able to speak up on human issues like you can through your writing. 

You question your own integrity – submitting AI work as your own questions the line between what you believe is wrong and right – do you think it’s right to submit what’s not yours? So, before you click that “submit” button on OLLE, think to yourself about whether a half-decent mark on this essay is really worth all the costs that come with it – no matter how confronting or how quiet.

In Chapel this Term we have been looking at our School’s values, with last week’s focus being grit. Mr Williams defined grit as being ‘the ability to push through and persevere in achieving long-term goals, even if that meant doing things we didn’t necessarily want to do’. He spoke about students studying hard and prioritising school work in order to achieve their long-term goal of the ATAR, sacrificing other things in their life to reach their full potential, and in that effect, their goal. 

This message rang true to me, as hard work, sacrifice and perseverance are the keys to successfully achieving our goals. 

However, it made me think about the need for balance amongst all of those things. Do we sometimes get caught up in knuckling down and studying late into the night, sacrificing sleep and rest for that ‘A’ grade? Do we find ourselves yet again foregoing quality time with our family and friends to finish that one assessment, all under the guise of having grit, of having that end goal in mind? The answer to this question for many of us is yes; we press pause on innate human needs for success, for achievement, and often, we end up burnt out and disconnected from those vital support systems that get us through the final push of high school. 

To counter this, I want to expand the meaning of ‘grit,’ merely by honing in on the part of the definition that emphasises doing things we don’t necessarily want to be doing. 

During the assessment period, some students might be tempted to produce an ‘all-nighter’ in the belief that studying is the only option, fixating on that one weak subject at the expense of literally everything else, but grit can look like knowing when to call it a night and go to sleep, resting your brain, despite wanting to continue and power through with your studies. Grit is about self-discipline. It might be tempting for students to lock ourselves up in our rooms for hours at a time, eating meals at our desks while studying for that one Biology exam or English essay, isolating ourselves from our families, but grit can look like spending just a few hours with your loved ones, simply taking a break and chatting to a sibling or friend for a minute.  

School is a marathon, not a sprint, and it does require grit, but it’s about the end goal, not sacrificing your values and basic needs for one assessment, one exam, and one small part of the bigger picture. A steady, balanced approach and a determined ongoing desire for self-improvement are the perfect partnership.